This past February, representatives from the city of Côte Saint-Luc, who have been responsible for planning and implementing the eight month old project, were invited to present their project and recommendations before the Quebec National Assembly’s Transport & Environment Commission during a session on ecological waste management.

With the example set by their composting program and the recommendations they presented at the National Assembly, councillor Steven Erdelyi, and the rest of the Côte Saint-Luc city council hope to motivate the provincial government into helping communities plan similar programs, effectively getting them on board.

“Basically the feedback was very positive,” said Erdelyi. “All the members, in fact, from all three parties were amazed at what we did for basically no money.” The entire pilot project cost an estimate $20,000.

“Our plan is more of a framework for other cities to follow,” said Erdelyi.

“One of our recommendations is basically for the government to set up a template, because when we started, we basically had nothing,” he said. “Our solution is not necessarily the perfect one, but at least it gives people a starting point.”

And a starting point is what Erdelyi thinks many municipalities need to realize that these programs are not as time intensive or expensive as one might think.

In their presentation to the Transport & Environment Commission, which is headed by D’Arcy-McGee MNA, Lawrence Bergman, the group from Côte Saint-Luc outlined the results of their pilot project, which within the 500 home sample group, achieved a 54.5 per cent diversion rate of organic materials to landfills.

This is only 5.5 per cent short of the 60 per cent residual waste diversion goal set out by the provincial government in 1998 for communities, which was to be be reached by 2008.

But Public Works Director David Tordjman, Councillors Erdelyi, and Mitchell Brownstein and Environmental and Safety Technician Oriana Familiar didn’t just go to Quebec City to present their final figures.

A key factor of their presentation was to outline some of the details a community will need to know in order to get a composting project going.

They cited which bins work best, strategies for compost pick up, ways to educate the public and finding suitable composting drop points to name just a few items.

From a political point of view, one of the issues which the representatives stressed to the members of the National Assembly, was the importance of communities receiving and properly using the money allotted to them by the redevances à l’élimination de matières résiduelles plan set out by Quebec.

The Redevaces plan collects a tax of $10,41 for every ton of garbage sent to dumps. This money is then to be redistributed to communities to help finance environmental waste management plans.

Erdelyi said that at the moment, there is little proof required that the money received is going to any pilot projects. In the case of the demerged municipalities on the Island of Montreal, that money is being help by the city of Montreal in an ongoing debate on who it rightly belongs to.

“They were surprised by the fact that we hadn’t got any money,” said Erdelyi.

At the municipal level, the key point Erdelyi stressed to the MNA’s was to make education a priority. When recycling was introduced to some of the apartments in Côte Saint-Luc by the city of Montreal, it got off to a slow start due to a near absence of education on recycling to accompany the new bins.

Composting presents a greater change in daily habits, so Erdelyi thinks an education campaign could make the transition towards the new practice that much easier. He said that the MNA’s have already zeroed in on the instructional DVD Côte Saint-Luc sent out to the homes participating in the project.

“Some of the members of the committee mentioned that they might use our DVD as a template for commercials to be on tv,” said Erdelyi.

While Côte Saint-Luc prepares to implement the second phase of its composting project, getting brown bins into single family dwellings, and then eventually to all the town’s residents, politicians have a wealth of new information to consider in helping get the rest of the province on board.

People interested in the composting project can go to Côte Saint-Luc’s website to see the brief presented to the National Assembly, containing all the city’s stats and recommendations at www.cotesaintluc.org